Tuesday, December 6, 2016

FBI might be in a bad spot.

Just an interesting thought. The FBI has simultaneously put itself on the naughty list of the opposing sides in the issues surrounding the election.

The FBI conducted an investigation into the obviously illegal activities of Hillary Clinton, including her use of a private home server for her State Department communications. The FBI declined to recommend charges, even in the same statement where Director James Comey stated that she had, in fact, broken laws. The republicans, the right wing, conservatives, Trump supporters, the "alt-right", whatever you want to call them, basically anyone who didn't support Hillary, was incensed by the FBI's decision and they all (rightfully) assumed that there were political shenanigans going on. This was not helped by the Tarmac meeting between Bill Clinton and Attorney General Loretta Lynch. These are the things that have severely damaged the reputation of the FBI in the eyes of right wing America.

Next, the FBI only a few days before the election decided to reopen the investigation after roughly 650,000 NEW emails were found on Huma Abedin's laptop during a sex crime investigation into her husband, Anthony Weiner's activities. This seriously damaged Hillary Clinton's polling numbers, which after months of intentionally skewed reports were finally beginning to "accuratize" themselves in a final push toward November 8th. Despite the FBI apparently going through these emails quickly and deciding that there was no reason to change their minds on whether to charge Hillary or not, the damage was done and the Clinton campaign was out of time to play damage control. They attacked the integrity of the FBI and Hillary's supporters just about lost their minds. In the days following her loss, Hillary and Bill Clinton repeatedly blamed the FBI for sabotaging the Clinton campaign, and their supporters are carrying that animosity today.

It's worth saying that Hillary's loss can be blamed on any number of things, since she is probably the absolute most corrupt candidate to ever run for the White House.

Regardless, the FBI managed to nosedive any amount of trust either side of the country had for the organization. That's not an easy thing to do, even in a superheated America where people don't need a whole lot of reason to stop trusting our law enforcement agencies.